YouTube Gains Industry Appeal as "Vloggers" Push Prestige Beauty

Posted: January 29, 2013

Think tank L2 says YouTube is becoming even more significant to the beauty industry, marked by year-over-year increases in video views.

In fact, the firm, which tracks prestige brands, says YouTube has become a top source of upstream traffic for twice as many brands in 2012 as last year. Most notably, the "vlogger," or video blogger, culture remains strong on YouTube and beauty brands are not only trying to get their products into vloggers’ hands, they are also peppering vlogger videos with InVideo ads. L2 points to L’Oreal Paris featured ads on eight of the top 15 YouTube beauty vlogger videos, and Bare Escentuals, Lancome, Maybelline and Urban Decay also purchased.

L2 also says Facebook remains the largest source of referral traffic, but a year-over-year analysis suggests that its influence is waning as it declined to 71% this year from 89% in 2011.

Twitter, L2 says, has essentially fallen off the map, registering no upstream or downstream traffic for beauty brands despite referring some, albeit minimal, traffic last year. The top three Twitter accounts are held by crossover fashion brands that frequently use the same handle to speak to their fashion and accessories audience, the firm notes. Furthermore, 10 brands in the study still have yet to establish a presence on Twitter.